predator

Warning:mUutations are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. See Uut Poetry for more info.

Here’s Matthew Zapruder’s “To a Predator”

I woke up early and saw a fox.
It was leaping and dragging its glorious
red and white tail behind it across
the road. It held a grasshopper in its mouth,
which it dropped when it saw the small
carcass of a young javelina. Last night
I was woken by their hairless rooting through
a field of cactus in moonlight. They all
stood together, ears rotated forward into
the breeze, protecting the single mother
protecting a pair of young. Their
mustachioed labium superius oris i.e.
upper lip protects a gentle tusk
the color of greywater. I almost sympathize
with their corporate need to snuffle
and roam in packs until dawn returns them
to hollows they made in the ground.
But my sleep does not. Thus I shone
a very powerful flashlight into their midst
and watched them scramble across
the highway, dispersing. Thus I walked
out into this morning, wearing a shirt
the color of a dandelion, whistling
an uncertain tune about the mild unequal
life I would like to know better of a rich
acquaintance in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.

I’ve been thinking about what Robert Kelly wrote in the early 60s about each image in a poem having “its field of force, its shadow moving darkly through the poem.” Arrangement, or sequence, for Kelly, is the key:

Basically, the fullest force is possible only by means of the successful employment of one image’s position in a context of other images… The subsequent image is conditioned, made to work, by the image that precedes it, and conditions, as it is finally conditioned by, the image that follows it: through the whole poem…

The whole poem is more than the sum of its parts. Very important for this superequivalence is the ORDER of images within a poem.

Kelly is thinking about images, but it is impossible not to see an overlap with narrative or dramatic sequence working the same way and being almost the same thing. In Zapruder’s poem, the most remarkable moment is not the encounter with the fox-mother and babies in the night, but the “shirt / the color of a dandelion” the speaker dons the next morning. The sensory and psychological tone in that detail gathers almost all of its meaning from the scene preceding it, the nocturnal encounter. “Thus” rhetorically aids the transference and reinforces the sense of a causality-link between this moment and the night before. We’re cognitively confused and delighted at the notion that a shirt’s color (or his choice of shirt) hours later had anything to do with the foxes. The tight, chronological structure of the poem amplifies this effect. What’s the “residue” of the previous images on the image of the shirt? It’s impossible to say—herein is the ineffable, almost magical trick poetry playing on the mind.

The effect also comes through a paradigmatic or contiguous relationship, much more directly having to do with what Kelly is referring to. Zapruder’s parallelism hints at it:

“Thus I shone / a very powerful flashlight…”
“Thus I walked / out into this morning…”

Synchronicity or simultaneity: two seemingly unrelated things happen in different places or times but are held together artificially. It’s more jarring when the things are further apart in time and space, such as the “rich / acquaintance” in Guadalajara. Somehow this new character belongs in the network of meanings with the foxes, flashlight and shirt.

This is more than, or something other than, metaphor. Zapruder’s metaphor of the foxes’ “corporate need to snuffle / and roam in packs” places a lovely, filtering veil of corporate America over fox-ness, opening all kinds of analogous correlations and possibilities. But corporate America is not the dramatic frame of reference, whereas the dandelion-colored shift and flashlight and foxes are and are thus forced into contiguity along a lateral axis. They share the same “ontological” status, whereas metaphor is figurative and removed. Obviously, metaphoric vehicles still lurks around “darkly through the poem,” but not as prominently.

This effect operates in a poem whenever there is a shift in discourse of subject matter. It’s not necessarily just Bly’s “leaping,” either, which requires emotional content. In Leaping Poetry, Bly wrote that Ashbery and his disciples didn’t properly “leap” because they merely change subjects without a “head-of-emotion.” But Zapruder’s shirt doesn’t have much emotional valence and it still works to bring that special aspect of reality to the fore: the paradox of the simultaneous unity of everything hidden in the appearance of disorder or chaos. So I’d take issue with Bly and agree more with Kelly, who says nothing about emotion. Merely changing subjects does seem to work.

Kelly sees transformation of the world as poetry’s function: “We are given: 1 world to transform, 1 language to transform it with,” and adds, “transformation is process, involves truth as emergent from process and not distinct from it.” Kelly was describing a new kind of poetry (deep image) when he wrote these ideas, but they have proven applicable to a whole range of poetics of disjunction.